An important milestone was announced by the service’s Jet Laboratory (JPL) in California. Astronomers have just added another 65 confirmed exoplanets to its Exoplanet Archive US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)now bringing their total number to 5,000.
At the same time, the rate of discovery of various species of planets outside our solar system is constantly increasing and is certainly expected to accelerate further in the coming years, as the operation of new large terrestrial and space telescopes will begin. Most notable is NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, which is already in orbit and is currently being tested, as well as the ground-based Giant Magellanic Telescope and Ultra Large Telescope (ELT) in Chile.
The 5,000 planets found so far include small rocky worlds such as Earth, gas giants larger than Jupiter and “hot Jupiter” in terribly close orbits around their stars. “There are also ‘super-Earths’, which are probably rocky worlds bigger than ours, smaller versions of our Poseidon and planets orbiting two stars at the same time, but also planets that persistently revolve around collapsing remnants of dead stars.”according to JPL scientists.
The file Exoplanets is located at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and for a planet to be included, its existence must first have been independently confirmed by two different scientific methods, as well as published in a recognized scientific journal.
The 4,900 are up to a few thousand light-years from Earth
The first two exoplanets were discovered in 1992 around a rotating neutron star (pulsar), while the first planet around a star like the Sun, a hot gas giant, was found in 1995, according to the Athens News Agency. Of the 5,000 confirmed, 4,900 are up to a few thousand light-years from Earth. 35% of the 5,000 exoplanets are the size of Poseidon and Uranus (usually icy worlds and less often warm), 31% belong to the super-Earth category, probably rocky worlds between Land and Poseidon (such planets do not exist in our solar system), 30% are gas giants the size of Jupiter and Saturn (which may be hotter than the Sun), while 4% are small rocky planets that have similarities with the Earth in their size and composition.
As the Exoplanet Archives scientist Jesse Christiansen put it, “If you think we are 30,000 light-years from the center of our galaxy, This means that there are many more planets in our galaxy that have not yet been found, around 100 to 200 billion, an unimaginable number».
Most of the exoplanets (over 2,700) were discovered with the American Kepler Space Telescope, which operated between 2009 and 2018. Of the terrestrial telescopes “exoplanet hunters”, the performance of the HARPS instrument of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is remarkable. , which has found more than 150 planets.
Source: News Beast
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